A short history of Prytaneum. 

Prytaneum began in 2019 with a grant from the Democracy Fund to PI Kevin Esterling (standing in the photo above) that funded building the initial prototype platform. The original developer was David Silva (seated just to Esterling's right) who built the first version before leaving in 2021 for greener pastures at Google. Kelton Adey (seated to David's right) was a member of the Prytaneum development team since its inception. Having graduated with a degree in computer science in 2021, Kelton took over as lead developer and project manager upon David's departure, and has led the project from finalizing its first version through the current version. The photo above was taken at the team meeting in February 2020 where we prepared for the first demo, which was to the UCR Board of Trustees. You can see a simplistic diagram of the initial version on the whiteboard. Ben Treves, a Computer Science PhD student (and now graduate) joined the team to lead the LLM-based data science in June of 2023. Throughout, Euchan Jang, a PhD student at the Ohio State University, has advised the project and lent insights from his significant experience in designing and facilitating effective meetings that we have incorporated into Prytaneum's current design. In addition to the initial grant from the Democracy Fund, Prytaneum also has been funded by grants from the Institute for Education Sciences, the UCR OASIS program, and additional funding from the UCR Information and Technology Services.

Lab Personnel:

Dr. Kevin M. Esterling, Ph.D. is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, and Director of the Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab) at the University of California, Riverside. He conducts extensive research on online town halls and was recently the chair of the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation for the APSA Presidential Task Force on Congressional Reform. 

View Kevin's profile here.

Dr. Yue Dong, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Technical Director of the Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab) at the University of California, Riverside.  Her ongoing published research on LLMs ranges from hallucination reduction, to safety, fairness, and efficiency. She will lead the RAG implementation.

View Yue’s website here.

Kelton Adey, the team’s full stack web developer, has implemented LLM APIs for backend website functions using scalable and agile dockerized containers, and has 6 years experience in web development project management.

Visit Kelton's LinkedIn page here.

Ben Treves is an advanced PhD student in the UCR Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Visit Ben's LinkedIn page here.

Euchan Jang is an advanced PhD student at the Ohio State University Department of Political Science. Euchan studies empirical deliberative democracy from a comparative perspective.

See Euchan's website here.

Dr. Mariam Salloum, Ph.D., is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Associate Director of the Laboratory for Technology, Communication and Democracy (TeCD-Lab) at the University of California, Riverside. Her research is in data integration, big data visualization, machine learning, and database management.

View Mariam’s website here.

The Prytaneum project also has involved UCR computer science undergraduate students who have worked on the project for course credit.  These include Jia Xie, Xichao Wang, Stan Muzhuthettu, Johan Guzman Avalos and Joseph Park, and many others.